Whitebox is a non-profit art space that serves as a platform for contemporary artists to develop and showcase new site-specific work, and is a laboratory for unique commissions, exhibitions, special events, salon series, and arts education programs.

Whitebox offers free and diverse programs for the surrounding communities including Chinatown, the Lower East Side, and international cultural tourism to experience an artist’s work in a meaningful manner.

Whitebox Art Center Vision

Through site-specific exhibitions, performances, screenings, readings, lectures, and panel discussions, Whitebox provides the opportunity to experience an artist’s practice in a meaningful way to the surrounding communities of Chinatown, the Lower East Side, and cultural tourism. It is Whitebox’s artistic vision to provide artists with sustained exposure, and create the environment for more in-depth interaction between audiences and artists’ practices. As a non-profit art space, Whitebox aims to be a space for invention. It achieves this by inviting emerging and established artists to respond to its exhibition space with interventions, performances, and developing long-term programming that allows them to develop projects and engage with audiences.

Whitebox Art Center’s History

Whitebox Art Center was founded in 1998. Within its first two years, Whitebox was nominated for “Best Group Show” by the International Art Critics Association for Plural Speech and for a survey of Viennese Actionists, Günter Brus and Hermann Nitsch. During its first decade, Whitebox Art Center built a reputation for producing thought-provoking exhibitions and initiatives that fostered engagement among a broad audience, including neighborhood low-income housing communities and the Bayview Women’s Prison.

The organization of Whitebox is at a pivotal transitional stage; building upon its sixteen year legacy of presenting contemporary art in the spirit of the avante-garde, Whitebox is expanding its mission to incorporate an annual international photography festival and yearlong salon series, increasing sustained support and exposure for artists.

New York City - Whitebox Art Center presents a solo show by Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar, produced and curated by Myriam Vanneschi.

The Israel Border Police denied artist Khaled Jarrar exit to travel to NYC for this project and his participation in the show Here and Elsewhere at the New Museum. He has since decided to create a new work for this show that deals with his status as well as the current situation in Gaza. This new media piece will be live updated as the situation develops.

Khaled Jarrar describes his experience attempting to leave Palestine on July 23rd, 2014:

“Another massacre is taking place in Gaza, and Israel is trying to sell it as a war with Hamas using a deceptive media campaign, turning the oppressed into a villain. It is a fact that Israel is an occupying and apartheid country that controls our land, steals our water and natural resources, depriving us of our basic human rights for the past 66 years. The Israeli recurrent massacres will never end. Telling and sharing our stories and what is happening in Palestine is very essential. We are obliged to take the streets and strongly condemn the killing of the people of Gaza”.

NO EXIT is produced and curated by Myriam Vanneschi and co-produced by Igor Molochevski.The programs of Whitebox Art Center are made possible in part by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

On view June 20th through 22nd 2014Opening reception June 20th | 6-8pm

New York City – Piotr Skiba’s New York premiere performance — HONKY — features a series of video installations that make use of elements of the ready-made & the found, combined with sequential performance footage to produce a single, if contextually fragmented, narrative focused on individual displacement. In a series of episodic self-portraiture — as if unpacking the Russian dolls of invented characters — Skiba offers a glimpse of his self-made mythology on the one hand, while on the other he opens a discussion on alterity, and the intense erosion of tolerance affecting the homogenous society of Poland.

The artist, penetrating the fluid boundary between himself and the Other, multiplies the motif of the mask. White mask vs. Black mask. Negative space, the relevant shapes; the “real” subject of conversation is oftentimes created by a deliberate reversal of the figure and ground. A Honky-Polack drowning in the incomprehensible soundscape of New York illuminates the desolation of the anonymous hobo-preacher, whose black silhouette seemed so arbitrarily pinned onto the whiteboard of Skiba’s hometown as to become his shamanic alter ego. Skiba projects persistent feelings of displacement — by setting things in a configuration and an environment where they in their turn displace and alienate, and thereby acquire a new aspect, an unfamiliar affect despite being familiar objects and ordinary people.

The key to the curatorial perspective may lie in the sculpture of Black Homer: an oversized plush “bath slipper” sprayed with matte paint which transforms one of the most influential characters in the history of TV — Homer Simpson — into a powerful totemic presence. Flattened by a black finish, the already dull features of this American suburban stereotype take on a painfully amorphous yet threatening expression. Power found, or power redeemed by blackness on a flip of this particular coin feeding a fascination of a young Polack with hip-hop, or rap culture.

The viewer is thrown into a disturbing carnival of schizophrenia when confronted by either the hoodie of the imaginary Negro from Skiba’s performance, a white high-end latex mask reminiscent of bank robberies, or the impenetrability of a foreign language described by Canetti as an ‘acoustic mask’. By a series of transpositions performed on the artist’s own face, body, or individual limbs used as fragmented images isolated from their original context, Skiba produces the associations of exclusion, loss, and finally, impending madness.

New York City – In collaboration with Whitebox Art Center, Asian American Arts Centre presents China: June 4, 1989, an exhibition on the lower level exhibition space of this non-profit institution. The exhibition features works from artists that were part of the original 1989-90 exhibition, in commemoration of the events at Tiananmen Square. Alongside these works, there will be a wall of clippings displaying news articles and mementos for those who want to learn exactly what happened – many in Chinese.

The original exhibition, which accumulated over 300 artists at Blum Helman Warehouse in SoHo, then later at PS 1 in Long Island City, eventually encompassed 174 standing panels (doors) linked to form a freestanding expandable wall. Over 80 small works were also on display. Artworks represented artists from Argentina, Sweden, Britain, Italy, France, Greece, Japan, and Korea. Each piece reflects the artist’s response to this social crisis from their own artistic and cultural stance, articulating peoples’ outcries in vivid multimedia formats. Multiple perspectives are gathered, reflecting a diverse response to expanding political horrors.

Curator Robert Lee states ”As the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square student massacre approaches, the erasure from history of this incident in China seems complete. For the peoples of every other nation in the world, however, the Tiananmen Square Massacre remains an open question. As a political question, censorship throughout China and the demands of Chinese citizens, like the Tiananmen Mothers, awaits recognition by China. As a human question, the tragedy and premeditation of this incident is incalculable, impacting China as well as the world. The humanity of the students was clear, and their murder by authorities an incalculable outrage. Yes, they shot the students. A horror magnified a thousand times by the media for the watching world. It focused and transformed the clash of Chinese political destinies into a televised drama of global proportions, imprinting itself on the human imaginary in epic dimensions. Never before was such violence turned into a spectacle, with weeks to prepare a global viewership, for the unspeakable to become suddenly reality.”

This exhibition serves to recognize this human tragedy, this global trauma, a human spectacle of incalculable proportions, buried and awaiting resurrection. The reverberations are still echoing throughout the world, in the hearts of the people who were there, concretely and vicariously; they watched and saw. Their grief and outrage and humanity are brought to the forefront here, with this exhibition acting as an archive for Tiananmen Square. In addition to the media event this moment became, these artworks depict the public response and feeling that was felt around the world. While creating work from a place of empathy, each also needed to evoke the gravity of the event. Although the styles and media vary, the overall goals of the artists are unified: to do Tiananmen Square justice as well as offering a space for commemoration.In conjunction with the exhibition, there will be a special screening of “Portraits of Loss and the Quest for Justice”, a documentary provided by Human Rights for China that consists of footage shot by the Tiananmen Mothers – a group of family members of those killed during the violent crackdown of the 1989 Democracy Movement. The documentary will be on view during the opening and closing receptions, at which time light refreshments will be available.

New York City – Now You See is the first exhibition in New York to survey the work of young Chinese video artists, through the eyes of the collector Dr. Michael I. Jacobs, who has been collecting Chinese video art in depth since 2010. The exhibition, drawn from his collection, brings together 21 rarely seen works by 11 young artists, mostly born in the 1980s, and includes multi-screen projective installations, animations, single screen projections and monitor works.